A lawsuit made by Gordon Vayo against the PokerStars site has been filed in recent days, claiming that the poker room is unjustly keeping the player’s $700,000 winnings from him. Vayo participated in the Main Event of the World Series of Poker in May 2017 and finished in the position of runner-up. However, he states that he still hasn’t received his winnings from PokerStars, and the story of such swiftly became a viral entity within the poker gamers’ community upon being told.
However, PokerStars wasn’t just going to sit back and let the player scribble all over its reputation in such a way. The operator has fired back stating that Vayo was actually participating in the tournament from the .com version of the site while residing in the United States. The activity is illegal in the country, but Vayo could have managed to access the platform via VPN in order to participate. PokerStars does have its own New Jersey poker room, although this is a ring-fenced platform.
The lawsuit itself says that Mr Vayo has provided certain evidence that states he was actually in Canada at the time of the PokerStars SCOOP tournament. However, despite this factor, the actual lawsuit doesn’t spend much time at all debating on whether or not Vayo was in the United States or not. Instead, it has much more of a focus on the efficiency of PokerStars to be able to prevent US players from accessing its international site. This, the lawsuit says, is a burden that should fall on the side of the poker room.
PokerStars Responds to Criticism
Reacting to the lawsuit and statements made within, PokerStars said that it is not able to comment on certain litigation matters. The site also claimed that its own investigation into the matter is still ongoing too. Alas, it also said that it has a duty to go onwards and protect the integrity of online poker, especially considering PokerStars is the most-regulated online poker site. It backed this statement up by saying that it always wishes to provide and secure and fair gaming environment for its players and that it has already paid out more than half a billion dollars in winnings from tournaments this year.
It’s actually quite a rare occurrence that PokerStars withholds winnings from players, so it’s more-than-likely that the platform has a good excuse to do so. The last time something like this happened though, it was in 2015. Back then, Jake Schindler also participated in a tournament and claimed that he was having his winnings retained by the poker room. However, evidence was eventually brought forth about Schindler’s claims that he wasn’t on US soil during the tournament.
While the outcome of the Schindler case doesn’t specifically cast any indication of where the Vayo case is going, it does provide evidence that players have been caught red-handedly breaking the rules before. At such a top-class poker site as PokerStars, technology there will be at its best, especially when it comes to the security of the site and compliance procedures.
